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Many panels at the conferences I go to end up being drab affairs with softball questions, way too much agreement and way too little insight. Which why I was pleasantly surprised by the Measuring Conversational Media panel at the conversational marketing summit yesterday. The panelists were:

• James Lamberti, SVP, Search & Technology, comScore
• Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
• Don Springer, President & CEO, Collective Intellect

Debra Aho Williamson from eMarketer, who was the moderator, didn’t have to ask too many hard questions as the panelists were more than happy to disagree with each other. There were three key issues:

• The difference between measurement and insight
• Approaches to measurement
• The role of standards

“Measurement doesn’t necessarily lead to insight” was a point Steve Rubel made a few times. He was implying that much of the new-fangled data collection and measurement focused on social & conversational media brought little value and insight to brand marketers. That may be true in general but in fast-changing environments it is rather difficult to say a priori what data one must collect and what analysis one must perform to achieve insight. Insight tends to be serendipitous and in my experience I’ve found that serendipity tends to correlate well with data availability. It’s hard to see what you can’t look at.

comScore’s Lamberti was emphatic that measurement doesn’t need to  be reinvented. Although conversational media and traditional media are rather different on a number of axes–reach vs. engagement campaigns, large vs. low volume, targeting value vs. targeting advocates, pushed messaging vs. dialog, etc.–the fundamental measurement is the same. Don Springer’s take was that one does, in fact, need fundamental advancements in measurenment in order to track key metrics such as number of conversations, share of voice and sentiment change. I think I fall on the side of Springer here. What’s the equivalent of sentiment change measurement in traditional Web analytics? Tracking star ratings or equivalents is insufficient since they won’t tell you want a blogger is thinking about a product or brand.

Steve Rubel and Don Springer really got into it when they discussed standards. Steve’s take was that w/o standards much of the measurement conversations are meaningless as they are about apples vs. oranges. At one point Don said “standards stifle innovation.” Both positions have truth in them but that’s topic for a longer post. I have to catch a flight back to Boston.

Update: the panel was also covered by PaidContent.

My friend Stevie Clifton, CTO at Animoto, pinged me early this morning with the news that Amazon has funded his company. This comes on the heels of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos using Animoto as a great example of how to leverage Amazon Web Services. Get the full story from Stevie who recorded a video telling how Animoto scaled from 50 server instances to 3,500 server instances after their Facebook launch.

Congrats to the Animoto team. They’ve built a very cool service and deserve to get a little breathing room.

I organized a panel on cloud computing at the Nantucket Conference last weekend. One of the panelists was Stevie Clifton, founder/CTO of Animoto. He shared a story about Animoto’s experience with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud and going viral on Facebook that speaks for itself so much so that Jeff Bezos used the example in a recent presentation.

Handling this type of spike the old-fashioned way would have been painful and expensive. If you plan on being successful and see these types of spikes in traffic, you should think about cloud computing from day one.

Sponsorships are growing as an advertising concept and the most interesting sub-segment is the one where consumers select the sponsors they want to be associated with. One of our companies, AWS Convergence Technologies (the folks behind WeatherBug) was a pioneer in this space. They even pioneered the Sponsor Select Network, which opens this for third parties.

An interesting twist to the model comes when you combine it with social incentives. The latest arrival (I saw the news in PaidContent today) is ArcheType Media / SocialVibe. They let brands sponsor your social network profile. Here is an example (on their site and on MySpace). The bait is doing good and getting goods.

The much expected, joked about and pre-announced MySpace developer platform is finally here. Well, not quite:

As Aber mentioned, we’re currently in a sandbox phase. Here are the important points to understand about this phase:

• Your application profiles are private
• Your apps install on real MySpace accounts, but are limited to three installations
• If your app renders a profile module, it will only be visible to users who have that application installed

So, essentially, the platform is in a public beta allowing for some back’n’forth between MySpace and the developer community. This is a good change in stance for MySpace, which has in the past taken a rather confrontational stance with respect to third party developers. I hope they have hired (a) some great platform architects and (b) some great developer community managers or else it’s unlikely that the outcome of the beta period will lead to significant improvements.

Always more of a media/lifestyle company than a technology company, MySpace has taken a long time to come to terms with opening up. Some months ago I had a conversation with one of the CXOs there about this very issue. From his comments it was clear that there was tension at the highest ranks about how to proceed. I guess Facebook’s growth accelerating and the company becoming progressively closer with Microsoft helped MySpace, whose own growth declined, realize that they need to open up and partner with a tech savvy power (Google, which is helping with OpenSocial and Caja). Good move, though I expect Google to benefit more in the long run than MySpace as it sets up OpenSocial for success.

Although Facebook and MySpace remain quite different, it will be interesting to see what developers do on MySpace. Let the widget games begin.

I spent the last few days in Deer Valley, UT at the annual Polaris Venture Partners Digital Media Summit or PVPDMS08 as we casually refer to it (right). It’s a great event where the CEOs of our digital media companies mix with industry heavies, both successful startup entrepreneur types and the folks with multi-billion dollar budgets. A few days of focused round table discussions, good food and fun physical activities are the best way to build relationships. It’s one of the many ways the Polaris network helps our entrepreneurs.

The weather this year was both great and marginal. Deer Valley got about  55-60” of snow in four days. The powder made the skiers happy. Those of us who don’t do the downhill thing went snowmobiling. We had a good time although snowfall killed the visibility as you can see on the pic. On the flip side, getting to dinners with the road closings was a challenge and today a few attendees narrowly escaped an avalanche at Deer Valley Resort.

We covered many important topics: from how to build organizations in digital media startups and scale infrastructure, to new content & advertising models, to monetization of UGC and other forms of social media, etc. Many of the comments were insightful due to the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives around the table. I have a few good follow-on topics for blogging that I hope to organize and post in the next few weeks.

On Friday the group was abuzz following the news of the Microsoft offer to buy Yahoo. Several of the attendees had stayed up overnight and were prepping for board calls and press interviews. Microsoft does best when someone is breathing down its neck. I hope the same is true for Google.

In a startup environment favoring fast, relatively cheap exits instead of building sizeable companies, it is always interesting to look at the choices startup founders and CEOs make when they have the option to sell the company or build it forward. It is a bit of a Rorschach test–telling much more about the individuals than about the situation.

As the entrepreneurs who I’ve talked to on the subject will attest, I’m hardly a person who’d talk against a business model that generates, say, $5-10M of value/year. If you keep your team small, manage your burn and take small investments (if any), selling a company for $15M after three years is not a bad deal if you and a co-founder have 30+% of equity in the business. Then, you can do it again. It’s fun. You have control of your destiny inside the company. You get to work with your friends. It’s good money if you set your aim right. I have friends who are on their third startup using this model and loving it. I have advised many founders to bootstrap and go with this model as opposed to seek VC or sometimes even angel funding.

At the same time, founders sometimes wish their good ideas had more impact, that their innovation touched and delighted more customers. They also acknowledge that being small means you often have little to no influence over the market you are in. You have little leverage. You go where the current takes you. You sink or swim based on your tenacity and agility.

Balancing control/ownership/agility with growth/leverage/impact is one of the hardest tasks of an entrepreneur. There may be a right or wrong answer for a company but there is no right or wrong answer for a person. We should not judge those who decide to stay small, even though they may have a big opportunity in front of them. Personally, I wish them the best of luck and hope that they will be successful and will want to build a bigger company the next time around. On the flip side, it is important to recognize that choosing the longer, harder path in an environment where quick exits are possible is a gutsy move worth raising a glass to.

My dear friend Brian Shin, founder/CEO of Visible Measures recently had to make this choice. I’ve known Brian for more than a decade. We worked together at Allaire and I’ve been an advisor to several of his companies. Visible Measures is an online video analytics company, the only one of its kind. VMC was doing well and, according to the rumor mill, it had suitors willing to pay a price that would have put many millions in Brian’s bank account. Since this is Brian’s third startup, it would have been easy for him to take the deal and go work on his fourth one. Instead, he chose to build a big company. This was a smart move because VMC’s business model enables network effects (how many different Nielsen-type services does one need for video?). Yesterday, at DEMO the company announced the release of its next-generation platform, the acquisition of Vidmeter and a sizeable financing. So, cheers, my friend, and best of luck as you build out this business.

Tangent: Coming full circle to the subject of Rorschach tests, my wife found a fantastic book called My Last Supper. Famous chefs are interviewed about what meal they would like to have before they die. This is the ultimate psychology test for a chef.

Google’s OpenSocial is becoming the lowest common denominator for application integration in the social media space. That’s actually not that great for Google as it is rarely the case that the most successful applications run on the lowest common denominator platform. Best implies leadership and innovation. You can’t get that just by being one of the gang. Some observations:

• Facebook is the place to be in social apps right now and, as the leader in the category, they are not planning on supporting OpenSocial anytime soon.
• On Monday, LinkedIn announced they are opening up and adding they own “set of REST APIs and widgets” and “have announced support for Google’s Open Social platform and will include other ways in the future as well”.
• Friendster is also opening up and has said that “OpenSocial APIs will be integrated into the Friendster Developer Platform when the much-stalled OpenSocial is completed and secure.”
• Not to be outdone, Bebo has launched an open application platform to complement its open media platform. Rather than joining up with OpenSocial, Bebo essentially cloned the Facebook APIs, e.g., they have SNQL (Social Network Query Language) for Facebook’s FQL and SNML (Social Network Markup Language) for Facebook’s FBML. 

In other words, OpenSocial is great but if you really want to work with us, use our native APIs. This situation complicates life for social application developers as the cost of experimentation and porting remains relatively high. Most application developers will choose to launch initially on Facebook to “test the market” and, if they see success, try others (Bebo because the port will be easy or OpenSocial, if its capabilities would support the application).

It would be interesting to see how much farther beyond OpenSocial MySpace goes. They may set the bar for OpenSocial. Since MySpace is not at heart a technology company, perhaps they will partner with Google to jointly figure this out.

I’m on a plane to SF (for a third week in a row) re-reading parts of John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity. It’s the kind of book you get more out of the second time around.

One of the observations is that saving time & effort by eliminating the need to choose is a powerful way to simplify an experience (third law). For example, I’ve switched to using an iPod Shuffle on flights because it offers the shortest path to music in my ears. I’m saving the time looking through thousands of albums and dozens of playlists. I’m also saving the potential frustration of picking which few dozen out of 40,000+ songs I’ll listen on the six hour flight.

In the physical world, consumption choices have steadily increased. In the digital world, they have skyrocketed. Despite search engines and a plethora of vertical portals, is has become increasingly more time-consuming to find exactly what we are looking for. Hence is it no surprise that businesses are spending increasingly on technology and marketing to convince us that we don’t need to think about choices. From personal shopping to online product recommendations to “automatic” content generation for our social network profile to auto-generated entertainment channels, we are letting software decide what we like.

On the flip side, eliminating the need to choose can get dangerously close to eliminating the need to think. The pleasure of simplicity can lead to a reduction in critical thinking (we complain about the masses being led by the media) then grow into apathy (few people are excited about voting in dictatorships) and in extreme cases can be downright dehumanizing as proven time and time again by atrocities committed by people who later claim they didn’t have a choice.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Amazon’s recommendation engine will dehumanize Internet shoppers. The trick is in the balancing of choice (complexity) with lack of choice (simplicity). This, not surprisingly, is another law in Maeda’s book.

Who does the balancing when it comes to online consumption? I see a somewhat unsettling shift where consumers increasingly cede this right to recommendation software whose ultimate goal is to optimize the P&L of online businesses. On average a business profits when its customers are happy but at the margin ad targeting systems, recommendation engines and services such as Loomia and Aggregate Knowledge (both of which I know well and respect much) are focused on the short-term P&L goals of their customers and not on your personal satisfaction because you are not their customer.

Which brings an interesting question: is there an opportunity for a personalization/recommendation service whose true customer (not user!) is the consumer? I believe so and have started talking with entrepreneurs about this.

Although some love to throw MySpace and Facebook in the same bucket, the two companies continue to evolve in different directions to the point where it is probably better to talk about meta-competition than direct rivalry.

The latest example is how they approached targeted advertising. Jeremiah has a solid analysis of what the near-term will likely hold for both companies.

MySpace’s approach–allowing brands to target across more than 300 affinities is more traditional and bound to lead to improved ROI given their scale in both users and inventory.

Facebook’s approach is novel, using the built-in viral loop to spread “trusted” brand endorsements. The trust comes from users choosing to endorse a brand. The message is controlled by the brand. In other words, Facebook users opt-in to become distribution channels for brands. It would be very interesting to see what incentives brands put in place to buy endorsement and the extent to which Facebook will provide tools for that. Also, Facebook has a strong incentive to impose some constraints on the system–I’m not sure this is the type of environment where unchecked market forces will yield an optimum outcome for any party (FB, users or brands). I guess I’ll have to find some time to play with the system, although from early reports such as Fred Wilson’s experience it seems there should be no rush.